Tributes have been paid to Sir Ralph Halpern, the high street tycoon and a leading force in British retail during the 1970s and 1980s, who has died, aged 83.
The clothing entrepreneur's death was announced by his family.
His daughter, Jenny Halpern Prince, said: “Our father left an irreplaceable mark on the spirit of entrepreneurship and the UK’s retail landscape, and he did it in his own very special way.”Sir Ralph, the son of Jewish immigrants who lost their family fortune fleeing Nazi oppression, started his career as a trainee at Selfridges but went on to become one of the most high-profile business figures of the Thatcher era as he presided over a huge expansion of the menswear chain Burton.
Sir Ralph also created the women’s fashion chain, Topshop, and later added department stores Debenhams and Harvey Nichols to his empire, which at its height contained 2,800 stores, employed 60,000 staff and was worth £1.9 billion when he stood down in 1991.
Margaret Thatcher knighted him in 1986, but he always considered himself to be an outsider in retail, despite being one of the first CEOs to earn a salary of £1 million a year. He also claimed to be one of the first company bosses in the UK to own a mobile phone.
Lord Stuart Rose, one of Sir Ralph's proteges and later the CEO of Arcadia - derived from Burton Group - described him as “one of the real movers and shakers in the 1970s and 1980s”.
Lord Rose added: “He was very charismatic, very driven and ahead of his time. Did we go too fast at times? Maybe. But he genuinely changed the face of the high street and he should get the credit for it.”
The takeover of Debenhams in the mid-1980s epitomised the buccaneering spirit of the times, with Sir Ralph controversially enlisting the help of Gerald Ronson to beat off competition from Mohammed al-Fayed’s House of Fraser group and clinch the £566m deal.
Tabloid newspapers, meanwhile, feasted on the details of his occasionally colourful private life, including an affair with model Fiona Wright.
He was ousted from the board of Burton in 1991 at the relatively young age of 50, following profit warnings, and did not play a high-profile Plc role again. At the end of the 1990s he relocated to Florida, though his LinkedIn profile still described him as “chair and CEO at the Burton Group”.
After his departure, Debenhams was demerged into a separate listed company while the Burton group was renamed Arcadia. Both were subsequently taken over — Debenhams by private equity groups, though it would later return to the stock market, and Arcadia by Sir Philip Green’s family.
Neither company exists in physical form today; Arcadia and Debenhams went into administration on consecutive days in 2020 and survive only online, as subsidiary brands of Boohooand Asos.
